Miss Robins thinks she is at war with men; she is really at war with sex. She wants to have men restrained, reproached, and incessantly scolded for things for which they are no more responsible than girls in a nunnery. Women dress extravagantly, paint their faces, brighten their eyes, wear high heels, disregard serious for trivial effective interests. It is the men, she says, who make them do it. It is not. It is the presence of men in the world which leads to these exaggerations and intensifications of sexual attraction; but that is a different matter altogether. If all men were reduced to a helot class, there would still be magnificent dresses and extreme physical display by women. And men do not welcome women as a sort of neutral competitors in their fields of work, because sex imposes a different attitude upon them. Sex is mentally as important, if not more important, to a normal man than it is to a normal woman. I am not writing of what ought to be, but of what is. Sex is an enormous physiological burthen for a woman, but not, it would seem, in most cases, such a mental burthen, and it does not last out her lifetime as it does a man’s. But for a normally constituted man woman is the natural symbol of life, and he cannot live fully and happily without her companionship and reassurance. She has a material need of his strength and his greater power over resources, but he is dependent upon her for gifts of peace and encouragement that cannot be covenanted for. Nature’s way has always been a paradoxical way, and it is a fundamental fact in this connection that as human life struggles up from the instinctive level we find no prepared adjustment of woman’s mind to man’s. There is no feminine mind different from and reciprocal to a man’s mind. They are both, man’s mind and woman’s mind alike, in the form of pure egotism. As the life of man becomes more civilised and mental, his need for an adequate helpmeet increases. He can no longer get along with a woman bought or captured and set to her special business in the harem. But while his need for a free and willing helpmeet increases and his demands upon her expand, we find no corresponding disposition in able women to co-operate with men. They seem to want to drop their sex and set up as imitations of all the successful male types. They become a new sex of little aggressive pseudo-men. They want to wear the wig of the judge and carry the mace in just the same spirit that makes the dressmaker adapt soldiers’ uniforms and turn the djibba of a dervish into a coquettish garment. They want to substitute Great Women for Great Men in our histories and turn out Buddha and Mahomet and Christ in favour of feminine equivalents. They will presently want a Lady God in a world in which the male will be a fading memory. It will be a parallel and parodied world. That is what makes this tumultuous eager book so significant and so dismaying. It is an incoherent silly sort of book, but it is written